Ben C Smith

This was the line that inspired my response:

I understood you as implying that the fact that it can be lifted out as a single block is at least one argument in favor of doing so. I now see that I was reading too much into your statement. My apologies.

I have questions about it, yes, but nothing severe enough to call for an excision... at least not yet.

Ben.

rlogan

Well, Ben I have to confess - that was an implicit argument.

I did not offer reasons, but it seems to me as a layman that a single block is easier to do - and also easier to pawn off in this respect: A "lost" passage is easier to pawn off as being "found", I think, than is reworking an existing one.

Sure thing. Now, the difficult work is to propose answers to those questions. If we leave them unanswered and yet keep Tacitus as a "witness"
to our favored model - and compound this with the questions lurking on our other witnesses too - then we have a whole house of cards.

We do have multiple corroboration of Nero as a world-class sadist and carnival show charioteer. So the material regarding the sadistic treatment of some class of individuals he could brutalize fits Nero's history.

The difficulty of course is the text attributing it to Christians and that it is not mirrored in Suetonius, for example, and not utilized by the Christians until later centuries is an important problem.

Martyrdom is THE core feature of the Christian paradigm. The central figure is a martyr. The early adherents are glorified as martyrs. For millenia this theme has resonated with Christian and makes billions at the box office. We see it as "proof" of the gospel in ancient works we are quoting here and we see it as "proof" offered by apologists today.

and therefore the absence of any citation until the 5th century stands as a question that needs to be answered.


Cheers.

sorompio

Did anybody explore the possibility that the 'christiani' of Tacitus are in fact related to the followers of 'Chrestus' that Suetonius mentions in his Vita Claudii?